As fast as the Impact conference arrived is about as fast as it is disappearing in our collective rearview mirror. It seems like a blur. In a word, the conference was... exhausting! In other words, it was informative, exciting, and illuminating. I hope that many of you had a chance to make it out there, and I hope more of you make it to Impact in 2013.

For those of you familiar with the conference, you know that it is typically a launching ground for new product versions and altogether new products. This year was certainly no different with the launch of the new version of WebSphere Application Server (8.5), the new and improved IBM Business Process Manager and IBM Operational Decision Manager, a new version of WebSphere eXtreme Scale (8.5), and numerous updates across the messaging and connectivity stack. While I encourage you to follow up on all of these important announcements, they are not what I am going to focus on today. Instead, I am going to focus on the new addition to the IBM family that got plenty of attention this year: IBM PureApplication System.

Joe recently touched on this new offering, so I won't get into an exhaustive overview. To put it briefly, IBM PureApplication System is an expert integrated system. What does that mean? First and foremost it means that it is a system -- a whole. It is an integrated platform of hardware and software, optimized and tuned for running transactional web and database workloads. I do not mean that it is a system of software that we pre-install on off-the-shelf hardware. Rather, it is the result of hardware and software engineers across IBM working together to build a system that is expert at what it does. More than just the web application and database software though, IBM PureApplication System also contains pre-installed and pre-configured management software that delivers a soup to nuts (hardware to application) single pane of glass for managing the entire system. I could go on and on, but again that's not my purpose here. I encourage you to check out the new IBM PureSystems web page for more information and some pretty cool videos.

For those of you that take a look at IBM PureApplication System you will quickly find that the notion of pattern-based deployments (something I have talked about at length on this blog) plays a key role in the new system. In fact, the same virtual system and virtual application pattern constructs that you have come to know in IBM Workload Deployer are front and center in IBM PureApplication System as well. In the new system, you can build custom virtual system and virtual application patterns, deploy them to your cloud, and then manage them over time. If you are familiar with the IBM Workload Deployer user interface, you will likely find yourself immediately familiar with the interface of IBM PureApplication System. Given all of that, if you are like many of the users I talked to at Impact and since, you probably have some questions as to IBM Workload Deployer and this new system. Most commonly, I get these two questions: "What does this mean for the IBM Workload Deployer product?" and "How do I know when to use IBM PureApplication System versus IBM Workload Deployer?" Let me do my best to address those questions.

In terms of the impact of the IBM PureApplication System on the IBM Workload Deployer offering, I can only view it in one way: affirmation. As I said above, IBM PureApplication System puts the mode of pattern-based deployments front and center, and further affirms that this kind of approach is crucial to the evolution of application delivery and management. Those of you familiar with IBM Workload Deployer or its predecessor WebSphere CloudBurst know that we have been talking about patterns for years. Rest assured we will continue to talk about patterns and solutions for building, deploying, and managing them. As it stands, we have at least three ways for you to build, deploy, and manage patterns: IBM SmartCloud Application Services, IBM Workload Deployer, and IBM PureApplication System. As you can see, options for consuming patterns have only increased since the initial launch of WebSphere CloudBurst. Furthermore, if you were at Impact, you know that we have a vibrant and vocal community of IBM Workload Deployer users, and I hope to see that community continue to grow! As I see it, the core technology of IBM Workload Deployer is becoming our 'operating system' for cloud platform management.

The question of when to use IBM Workload Deployer or when to use IBM PureApplication System is one whose answer is a bit more nuanced and not something one can or should try to definitively answer in a blog post. One thing I do suggest though is that when evaluating these two technologies, it is important to acknowledge that they have different business value propositions. Sure they share common core technology in terms of building, deploying, and managing pattern-based environments, but beyond that they diverge a bit. Remember, IBM PureApplication System is, well a system. It is the hardware, software, and management technology you need to run your middleware application workloads. It is pre-built and pre-integrated to the point that it only requires you to roll it into your datacenter, hook it up to your network, and do some one time configuration. The aim for the duration between receipt of the system to up and running with your first deployment is four hours, and if you were at Impact you saw an amusing video with the chief architect (Jason McGee) that proves this claim.

IBM Workload Deployer is fundamentally different in terms of how you consume it and how it integrates with your infrastructure. Most notably, IBM Workload Deployer does not include optimized hardware (servers, storage, networking) for running your workloads or a single point of management for everything from hardware to applications. To use IBM Workload Deployer you attach it to your network and point it at existing virtualized servers. Simply put, IBM Workload Deployer assumes you have existing, under-utilized hardware that you can get more out of with the intelligent deployment and management approach the appliance delivers. While you do not get the pre-integrated and optimized system of hardware plus software, you do get the flexibility to use your existing infrastructure.

As you can see, there are similarities (patterns) and differences (whole system vs. management system), and the result is a pretty different set of value propositions. The key in evaluating these technologies is that you do so with a crisp understanding of your current needs AND your future plans for growth and evolution. I know this kind of advice is a bit generalized, but I hope the differences I discussed above help you to at least understand the capabilities of the two different offerings. As always, if you have any comments or questions, please reply to the post!

Lately, I have run into multiple situations where an IBM Workload Deployer user has been trying to decide exactly how they want to create their customized images for the cloud. Essentially, they have been trying to decide whether to use the native extend and capture capabilities of IBM Workload Deployer, or to pursue the use of the Image Construction and Composition Tool (also included with the appliance). The conversations have been interesting and challenging, but more importantly, they have been a reminder that constructing enterprise-ready environments for the cloud does not happen by magic. It takes thought, deliberate planning, sustainable design, and the tools to carry everything out.

The tools part we have covered. I have every confidence, bolstered by user experience after user experience, that IBM Workload Deployer and associated tools (like the Image Construction and Composition Tool) equip you to build highly customized, cloud-based application environments. In this post, I want to focus in on the thought process that goes into how you decide to build your customized environment. Specifically, I would like to talk about important points to consider as you try to understand whether to use the native extend and capture capabilities of IBM Workload Deployer or the Image Construction and Composition Tool.

To be clear from the outset, I am not trying to provide a decision flowchart in this post. For all intents and purposes, that would be next to impossible. Instead, I want to pose to you some important questions that you should ask of yourself, along with the reasons why I believe those queries to be important. Keeping in mind that this is not an all-inclusive list, here it goes:

Question: Are the customizations that you want to make congruent with an IBM-supplied image?

Reason: One of the first decisions you should make is whether or not you can start with an IBM-supplied image as the base for your customization. You need to know what middleware elements (type and version) make up your environment and what operating system should host that environment (version and distribution). You can match that information against the list of content that IBM supplies. If there is a match, you should start by looking at extend and capture to customize that image to meet your needs. If there is no direct match, you may be looking at the Image Construction and Composition Tool.

Reason: If you simply need to add additional components that supplement software already in an IBM image, I believe it is best to first examine the use of extend and capture. Whether these components are IBM software or not is irrelevant as the extend and capture functionality does not care.

Question: How configurable do you want to make the custom content in your image?

Reason: If you are adding content into the image, you need to think about just how configurable you need it to be. When you use extend and capture, you add the content to an existing image in a manner that pretty well ends up being opaque to IBM Workload Deployer. To configure that content, you need to have script packages and make sure they are part of every pattern you create based on the image. Alternatively, if you use the Image Construction and Composition Tool, you can embed configuration behavior in the image's activation engine, and you can expose deploy-time parameters without needing to include script packages in every single pattern. As an example, if you need to add a monitoring agent into your environment, you would likely do this via extend and capture and end up with a pretty simple script package to configure that agent during deployment. If however, you need to create an image with a custom database, you would likely favor the Image Construction and Composition Tool as you could embed common deploy-time configuration parameters directly in the image. For a database, there are likely to be many more deploy-time configuration parameters that you want to expose as compared to a more simple monitoring agent.

Question: Is your main focus on making operating system changes?

Reason:If your primary focus is on making operating system changes AND the answer to the first question is that your target content aligns well with IBM-supplied images, then extend and capture is where you want to start. Of course, you need to make sure that you can make all necessary changes to the OS with extend and capture, but I will say that this capability is not very restrictive at all.

Admittedly, this is a short list, but I believe it is a good starting point for how you decide upon one approach versus the other. Also, I would be remiss not to point out that these tools are absolutely not mutually exclusive. Many users I work with use a combination of the two approaches. In fact, there are some use cases that call for both tools. Start by creating a completely custom image in the Image Construction and Composition Tool, and then subject that image to the extend and capture process in IBM Workload Deployer to customize it for a particular purpose, team, project, etc. I hope you find this helpful, and I welcome your feedback or thoughts!

When many people think of cloud computing they immediately think of virtualization and virtual machines in particular. This is completely natural and not at all surprising. After all, one of the core underlying technologies necessary for cloud computing is virtualization. However, it is important not to confuse one element of cloud computing with the entire thing - and this can sometimes happen. Many people have begun to leverage virtual machines in their on premise environment and sometimes begin to call this their private cloud. While virtualization is a substantial step forward and help gets you started down the necessary path of standardization and automation that is essential in a cloud - it is not in and of itself "a cloud".

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has published its definition of cloud computing. This is a very complete and yet concise definition that includes not only the essential characteristics of a cloud solution but also the service models (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) and deployment models (public, private, hybrid, community). It is a great way to get a perspective on cloud and can be useful when considering the solutions of various vendors.

Let me summarize the essential elements of cloud from this definition here:

on-demand, self-service

broad network access

resource pooling

rapid elasticity

measured service

So, this is interesting. Not only is this much more than just virtualization - but virtualization isn't even mentioned in the list explicitly. Not to worry - virtualization is of course important and is included under the resource pooling topic. I would assert that virtualization is also necessary to facilitate the type of on-demand, self-service, elastically scaling resources that are leveraged in a cloud. What is crystal clear from this definition is that there is a lot more to a cloud solution than just virtual images and some hypervisor infrastructure upon which to run them. Somebody must provide the necessary on-demand/self-service capabilities, the network access to these services, the management of the resource pools, enabling true elasticity for running systems, measuring services and so forth. IBM Workload Deployer provides just such capabilities for the on-premise cloud allowing you to efficiently deploy patterns built for virtual systems and virtual applications with deep knowledge of the middleware that is being provisioned to optimize these solutions. Furthermore, Workload Deployer provides the complete lifecycle management from pattern creation, to deployment and provisioning, applying maintenance, resource and license management in the on-premise cloud, elastic scalability, and eventually returning resources to the on-premise cloud to be reused. Workload Deployer is a complete solution for not only server virtualization but of course for cloud computing.

However, virtualization doesn't have to stop with just virtual machines. It is a general principle that can be applied to more than just servers. At its core, virtualization is really about providing a level of abstraction between some real resources and the consumers of those resources. This is a natural fit when we think of server virtualization and virtual machines. However, there are also substantial benefits to be gained by adopting a similar abstraction between the middleware and the applications themselves - sometimes referred to as application virtualization.

By application virtualization I mean providing the capabilities to abstract the application from the underlying infrastructure such that it can be elastic, participate in health management policies, and provide agility across the pool of application infrastructure resources. This type of application virtualization is built into our Virtual Application pattern (hence the name) in Workload Deployer and surfaced in solutions via policies (such as scaling and routing), and high availability functions built into the Web Application pattern type. For Virtual Applications these features are fully integrated and optimized functions as are all elements of Virtual Applications. However, similar features have also been available for WebSphere Application Deployments in Virtual System patterns with a special extension.

WebSphere Virtual Enterprise provides application virtualization for traditional WebSphere ND solutions and this same feature is delivered for Virtual System pattern deployments of WebSphere Application Server by use of the Intelligent Management Pack. Leveraging the capabilities of Workload Deployer with Virtual Systems lets you gain the benefits of server virtualization and to reduce hardware, provide rapid and consistent deployment of entire systems, dynamically adjust resource consumption, and much more. Leveraging the capabilities of the Intelligent Management Pack provides the ability to manage service level agreements with elastic scaling and health management, lower operational costs, and provide for improved application management. These two solutions together provide a powerful combination to improve the management and resiliency of your enterprise applications.

If you would like to learn more about application virtualization using the Intelligent Management Pack in conjunction with Virtual System Patterns in IWD then please join Keith Smith and myself tomorrow for a webcast on this very topic. Keith is the lead architect on our WebSphere Virtual Enterprise and Intelligent Management Pack products and brings a wealth of experience in this space. So don't miss this opportunity - register here.

I hate sitting on secrets. I always have. I understand that sometimes it's in the best interest of everyone (and your job) to keep tight lips, but that does not make it any more fun. Inevitably, the run-up to our annual Impact conference means everyone in the lab is doing their fair share of secret keeping -- just waiting for announce time. For a lot of us, that day ended Tuesday with the announcement of the IBM Workload Deployer v3.0.

Now, you may be wondering, 'I have never heard of this. Why is it version 3.0??' Well, IBM Workload Deployer is a sort of evolution of the WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance, which was previously at version 2.0. This is good news for all of our current WebSphere CloudBurst users because all of the functionality (plus new bits of course) that they have been using in WebSphere CloudBurst are present in IBM Workload Deployer. You can use and customize our IBM Hypervisor Edition images in IBM Workload Deployer. You can build and deploy custom patterns that contain custom scripts in order to create highly customized IBM middleware environments. So, what's the big deal here? Two words: workload patterns.

Workload patterns represent a new cloud deployment model and are an evolution of the traditional topology patterns you may have seen with WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance (I am a little torn between evolution and revolution, but that's splitting hairs). Fundamentally, workload patterns raise the level of abstraction one notch higher than topology patterns and put the focus on the application. That means, when you use a workload pattern the focus is on the application instead of the application infrastructure. Perhaps an example would be helpful to illustrate how a workload pattern may work in IBM Workload Deployer.

Let's consider the use of a workload pattern that was part of the recent announcement, the IBM Workload Deployer Pattern for Web Applications v1.0. Just how might something like this work? It's simple really. You upload your application (maybe a WAR or EAR file), upload a database schema file (if you want to deploy a database with the solution), upload an LDIF file (if you want to setup an LDAP in the deployment to configure application security), attach policies that describe application requirements (autonomic scaling behavior, availability guidelines, etc), and hit the deploy button. IBM Workload Deployer handles setting up the necessary application middleware, installing and configuring applications, and then managing the resultant runtime in accordance with the policies you defined. In short, workload patterns provide a completely application centric approach to deploying environments to the cloud.

Now, if you are a middleware administrator, application developer, or just a keen observer, you probably have picked up on the fact that in order to deliver something as consumable and easy to use as what I described above, one must make a certain number of assumptions. You are right. Workload patterns encapsulate the installation, configuration, and integration of middleware, as well as the installation and configuration of applications that run on that middleware. Most of this is completely hidden from you, the user. This means you have less control over configuration and integration, but you also have significantly reduced labor and increased freedom/agility. You can concentrate on the development of the application and its components and let IBM Workload Deployer create and manage the infrastructure that services that application.

Having shown and lobbied a bit for the benefits of workload patterns, I also completely understand that sometimes you just need more control. That is not a problem in IBM Workload Deployer because as I said before, you can still create custom patterns, with custom scripts based on custom IBM Hypervisor Edition images. The bottom line is that the IBM Workload Deployer offers choice and flexibility. If your application profile meshes well with a workload pattern, by all means use it. If you need more control over configuration or more highly customized environments, look into IBM Hypervisor Edition images and topology patterns. They are both present in IBM Workload Deployer, and the choice is yours.

If you happen to be coming to IBM Impact next week, there will be much more information about IBM Workload Deployer. I encourage you to drop-by our sessions, ask questions, and take the opportunity to meet some of our IBM lab experts. Hope to see you in Las Vegas!

Customers are always impressed when they learn about the simplicity, resiliency, and rapid time to value they can received from virtual applications. However, they are usually a little mystified at how virtual applications really work. After all - they have become quite accustomed to doing things the "traditional way" where they control every aspect of their applications manually. Virtual Applications represent an entirely new way of thinking. Sure, the benefits are enormous but can you really trust them? How is it doing all of this anyway?

What seems like "magic" is really a sophisticated and coordinated set of activities driven and coordinated by IBM Workload Deployer while leveraging the expertise built into the pattern type. Yes, you can trust it because experts have worked to build the system and created to it react and respond much faster than you can. When moving away from manual processes to automated processes it is always nice to get a sense of what is really happening. I think it is just human nature. We can't really place our trust in something until we have first hand experience or understand what it is really doing ... I guess it is the critic inside each one of us. Even after you've experienced the value it is still reassuring to see and understand the "how".

It is the "how does it do that?" type of question that I attempted to answer for virtual applications in a blog post I wrote on the Expert Integrated Systems blog recently. It attempts to pull the curtain aside and describe what is actually happening to support a virtual application pattern. As with my previous post - this was written for IBM PureApplication Systems but the concepts are 100% applicable to IBM Workload Deployer. I think you will find it interesting ... Continue reading ...

Applications - just like humans, animals, plants, and many other things - have a life cycle. They are conceived, given birth, grow, do foolish things in youth, hopefully improve over time, have problems that need to be fixed, don't always age well .... and eventually they will die and release their assets to the next generation. Sounds kind of familiar, doesn't it?

One of the many benefits of virtual application patterns in IBM Workload Deployer and related IBM offerings is support for the complete life cycle of the application. You can manage the complete life cycle of virtual applications from a single interface that is fully integrated and well thought out - not just a series of links from one product UI to a different product UI. This eliminates the complexity of having to work with different interfaces, paradigms, metaphors, controls, labels, names, authorization, and so on - that is often the norm in many customer environments today. I think the benefits of this integration are obvious - eliminating confusion, configuration, miscommunication, interpretation, and mapping errors. Providing a truly complete solution also facilitates a common knowledge base and encourages cooperation and collaboration among teams. You can share patterns, providing consistent governance for a solution, guarantee consistency in deployments, and build upon the expertise provided by others. Having an integrated solution for design, development, deployment, configuration changes, monitoring, and problem determination ensures that time is not wasted and valuable information is not lost.

If you have been wanting to get some first hand experience with patterns of expertise in preparation for IBM PureApplication System or IBM Workload Deployer but you don't yet have a system of your very own to use ... then you will want to check out this post/video and then download the Virtual Pattern Toolkit for Developers! It's absolutely free and will get you up and running with a virtualized system in a short while. Check it out!

IBM Impact 2012 was just last week with a theme of "Change the Game" ... and I'm still reveling in all of the excitement and energy that goes into conferences such as this. I was fortunate to get a last minute spot to attend the conference and help out at the Solution Center where I had the chance to speak to a lot of customers and other IBMers interested in cloud computing. Among the many things that stood out - there is certainly a lot of interest in cloud computing and patterns of expertise - it also seems that folks are ready to get some first hand experience with these patterns. There's plenty of opportunity for that!

The answer is yes, I did a related but different blog post with a similar title a few weeks back. At that time I was primarily highlighting a webinar that I co-presented with Keith Smith regarding the various virtualization solutions and features that are available in IBM Workload Deployer in virtual application patterns and virtual system patterns leveraging the Intelligent Management Pack (IMP). If you didn't get a chance to attend that webcast live then I encourage you to check out the replay (especially Keith's portion with details on IMP - a really helpful overview).

This new blog post expands on the theme of that original blog post but takes a broader vision of where IBM has been with our private cloud offerings in WCA and IWD up to and including the recently announced IBM PureApplication System - and how this history demonstrates our leadership in supporting applications in the cloud.

We've been talking a lot recently about Virtual Application Patterns and enhancements to this deployment model in IBM Workload Deployer v3.1. This is appropriate because virtual applications are a substantial evolution for application deployment in a private cloud. Virtual Application Patterns deliver on the promise of Platform-as-a-Service - letting you focus on the application while Workload Deployer builds the necessary platform to deploy and manage your application.

However, Virtual System Patterns are still alive and well ... and quite frankly, this is where many people begin to explore the functionality provided in Workload Deployer. For many, it is a logical first step to start recreating familiar physical environments in the private cloud and then leverage these environments to develop and test their applications. It is also a great way to build out new applications using familiar concepts, leveraging existing scripts, and take full advantage of the agility, consistency, and increased resource utilization available in a Workload Deployer managed private cloud.

You may recall that virtual system patterns are sometimes called topology patterns because they are used to define a topology middleware configuration to meet application requirements. With a virtual system pattern you define exactly the type of middleware configuration that you need for your application environment and Workload Deployer provisions exactly that configuration when the pattern is deployed to your private cloud.

To use an automotive analogy, you might compare virtual systems to building your own hot-rod from a molded frame while virtual applications are more like purchasing a complete vehicle from a dealer. When you purchase a vehicle from a dealer you receive a fully functional automobile. Sure, you can choose the color and some options – but you don't necessarily know the details of all of the components that make your vehicle functional. Just add a driver (you) and off you go! This saves you substantial time and money while freeing you from the need to be an automotive engineer. As with the production vehicle, virtual applications are optimized for a specific purpose and are extremely effective when used for that purpose. All you need to do is add your application (the driver) and run-time requirements. Virtual system patterns are like the hot-rod approach. You start with a modeled frame of sorts (hypervisor edition images) – thereby saving time and effort so you don't have a start from scratch. However you still have the responsibility and flexibility to create a very unique custom vehicle. Doing so requires more expertise and a greater time investment when compared to a production vehicle (virtual application), but you get to decide all of the details. With virtual systems you specify the exact vehicle you need for your application. This provides substantial flexibility but requires a deep knowledge of the middleware and an investment of time building necessary scripts and other elements to support your application environment.

So as I mentioned, virtual system patterns are very popular. And if you have been following recent posts about the enhancements delivered in IBM Workload Deployer v3.1 you noticed that several of the features primarily focused on virtual applications have at the same time been extended to virtual system patterns - such as the shared caching service and the new base AIX image. So we certainly consider virtual systems deployment model to be important. IBM Workload Deployer v3.1 delivered new hypervisor edition images and the IBM Image Construction and Composition Tool was bundled with Workload Deployer - primarily used for creating custom images to leverage in virtual system patterns. The IBM Image Construction tool is a substantial advancement in the ability to create your own custom base images.

To help communicate that we haven't been neglecting virtual system deployment patterns, I created a new demo to highlight this deployment model. The demo begins by providing a quick overview of the components that go into a virtual system pattern. It then shows how to clone a pattern to customize it for your own purpose, deploy it, monitor licenses, and monitor resource usage in your private cloud. Finally, it shows a quick demonstration of installing an emergency fix to a deployed virtual system instance.

I'll be showing this and other demos at IBM Pulse 2012 next week. I hope to see you there!

As many of you well know, virtual images are the foundation of virtual system patterns in IBM Workload Deployer. Whether you are using IBM Hypervisor Edition images or custom-built images produced by the IBM Image Construction and Composition Tool, every virtual system pattern has at least one virtual image as part of its foundation. So, if virtual images are the foundation of virtual system patterns, what is the foundation of these virtual images?

While you could probably make a good argument for a number of different things being the foundation of the virtual image (operating system, other installed software, etc.), I like to think that, at least in the context of IBM Workload Deployer, the activation engine inside the virtual image is the true foundation. Inside this activation engine, you will find a collection of scripts and services that are capable of configuring the virtual machine for use. Not only does this engine perform basic system-level actions like configuring the machine's hostname, IP address, time, and network interfaces, but it also configures the software on the inside of the virtual machine. For instance, the activation engine in the WebSphere Application Server Hypervisor Edition image is capable of fixing up profile information, federating nodes, creating application server clusters, and more. Best of all, in the case of IBM Hypervisor Edition images, you (the user) get all of this right out of the box. There is no logic to perform or administrative tasks to undertake in order for you to benefit from the activation engine. It is simply there!

So, at this point you may ask yourself 'If all of this is included right out of the box, why do I need to care?' That is a fair question, but ultimately I feel it is always important to understand the foundational elements of any technology. In this respect, I do not feel like the activation engine in the IBM Hypervisor Edition images is any different. Lately, I have been telling my users to take at least a little time to understand what the activation engine is and even more importantly, what it is doing for you during deployment. Specifically, I always suggest taking a little time to look at the scripts in the activation engine -- most often found in the /opt/IBM/AE/AS directory of a virtual machine deployed by IBM Workload Deployer.

What can be gained by taking the time to peruse through these scripts? I think most importantly, you will learn what the engine does for you and what you cannot do if you expect the image to deploy correctly. For instance, if you look in some of those activation engine scripts, you will see that it uses the sudo command in several places. While I know many of you may be tempted to remove the sudo command during extend and capture, if you do so it will break the activation engine. I have seen this happen multiple times, and trust me, if you did not know the activation engine used that command it is not necessarily an easy problem to debug. This is a case where the value of at least superficially understanding the activation engine is clear.

Want another example? Okay, consider that you want to run WebSphere Application Server as a user called wasadmin. At pattern deployment time, it is easy enough to supply wasadmin in the appropriate field of the part configuration data and click OK. IBM Workload Deployer deploys the system and voila, WebSphere Application Server is magically running as wasadmin. Everything is fine so far, but let's take this a step further and say that you previously performed an extend and capture, and you installed software components in the image that should be owned by your wasadmin user. It is technically possible to define users during extend and capture and then install software content via that user, but if you also want to specify that user as the WebSphere Application Server administrative user at deployment time, you will run into an issue. This is because the activation engine runs the usermod command during deployment to change the existing and default virtuser into the user that you specify -- in this case wasadmin. If the usermod command attempts to change virtuser to wasadmin but wasadmin already exists as a user on the operating system, the command will not complete properly, and it is very likely you will see further errors downstream. A simpler way to do this is to create the user during extend and capture, install any components via that user, and then delete the user before capturing. You can attach a deploy-time script that fixes up the appropriate settings for wasadmin (like user ID and group ID), and it will run after the activation engine successfully does a usermod and changes virtuser to wasadmin.Problem averted!

In reading some of the above, I fully realize that it may be a little confusing at first. That said, I assure you that there is not much to it at all once you have a basic understanding of the activation engine. With a basic understanding of the activation engine in tow, you will know what you do not need to do (e.g. create profiles, federate nodes, etc.), what you cannot do (e.g. remove the sudo command), and what you can do with a little bit of reconciliation work (e.g. define your WebSphere Application Server administrative user during image extension). I encourage you to take a little time with your next deployment and give the activation engine a once over. You will undoubtedly have a better understanding of the deployment process, and you will ultimately be in a position to most effectively leverage virtual system patterns in IBM Workload Deployer.

Everybody likes having choices. This is true whether you are talking about lunch or deploying to a private cloud. When IBM Workload Deployer v3.0 was first introduced it included a pattern type for our Database-as-a-Service offering. The DBaaS PatternType v1 provided substantial value in an easy to use form factor to get a database up and running quickly and then provided the necessary tools to manage that environment. Pretty impressive for a first release! But the story doesn't end there. IBM Workload Deployer v3.1 brings an updated version of this pattern type that builds upon this foundation and adds even more capabilities and more choices.

Some of you may not be familiar with the Workload Deployer Database-as-a-Service offering so let me give you a brief introduction. Database-as-a-Service patterns allow you to define and deploy database applications into your private cloud environment with speed and consistency. These offerings also provide integrated management and monitoring capabilities. The Database-as-a-Service capability can be used in conjunction with a web application pattern (Patterns -> Virtual Applications, IBM Web Application Pattern) by including a database component in a pattern connected the web application components to use it. In this case the web application and database are deployed and managed as a unified solution with a common life-cycle as shown in the pattern below.

Database patterns can also be created and deployed as standalone entities (Patterns -> Database Patterns) that have their own life-cycle, independent of the virtual web application(s) that use the database. What's more, you can leverage these stand-alone databases from applications both inside and outside your private cloud.

Whether you use a stand-alone database pattern or one that is part of a web application pattern, the attributes and capabilities of the database are consistent.

So what is new in this release? For starters, the DBaaS PatternType has been renamed and the capabilities expanded. For Workload Deployer v3.1 the pattern is delivered as the IBM Database Patterns v1.1 and includes several elements to provide predefined configurations: the IBM Transaction Database Pattern and the IBM Data Mart Pattern.

Before we take a closer look at the new features I just want to alert you to one thing. Before you can leverage any of these new features you first need to accept the licenses and configure the plugins for the database pattern types. So look at the link and follow the directions if you would like to along and you aren't seeing the same options in your IBM Workload Deployer V3.1 system.

Using the screen shot above as a reference, let's take a look at what you can specify when creating a database pattern. You start with a name for the pattern and an optional pattern description. You also specify the maximum user data space size and an optional schema file. These are pretty basic and were all available with in the previous release. Another really nice feature that has also been available since the first release is the ability to specify a compatibility mode for DB2 and Oracle (a nice feature if you are looking to move content from existing databases).

Some of the new enhancements appear in the middle of the view; the purpose and source. The purpose specifies if this database is to be used for production or non-production (test and development). Your selection will optimize license management for deployed instances of this pattern.

The source field lets you specify a database configuration to be used to provision this database. You can choose from two different provisioning approaches; applying a workload standard or cloning from a database image. When choosing apply a workload standard you select between two predefined, optimized database configurations. These configurations will run a set of scripts to tune the operating system and instance configuration for the database. The departmental transactional standard is optimized for online transaction processing applications while the data mart standard is optimized for data mining purposes and is therefore more suitable for reporting applications. If those aren't exactly what you want but you have an existing database you can use the clone from a database image approach by selecting an existing database image backup as a model for the new database pattern. When using the clone method metadata from the backup is retrieved and a DB2 restore command is used to set the same configuration for the new database instance. Reference the cloning from a database image topic in the IBM Database Patterns information center for more details.

Once the pattern has been created you can deploy the pattern to a target cloud group or an environment profile (another new feature for database deployments in IBM Workload Deployer V3.1).

I hope you can see the value that has been added with the source configuration choices and the ability to clone an existing configuration. They are certainly substantial new features of the Database-as-a-Service solution in Workload Deployer V3.1. However, there are a number of other significant enhancements that I would just like to mention as well. In other posts we've discussed the new ability to deploy virtual applications to run on AIX with a PowerVM hypervisor. As you might expect this same ability is also available to deploy database patterns to run on AIX systems leveraging PowerVM. Management capabilities have also been significantly enhanced with the ability to configure automated database backups using the IBM Tivoli Storage Manager. These features and many other aspect of the Database-as-a-Service model are detailed in the IBM Database Patterns information center and the IBM Workload Deployer information center. My goal here has not been to replicate our product documentation - it is rather my goal to provide a few highlights and provide pointers to help you get started. I hope it has been useful.

You can be sure that we will continue enhancing and improving our Database-as-a-Service offering in IBM Workload Deployer. Please provide your feedback so that we can make it even better.

In the previous post I spoke about how a Virtual Application feature introduced in Workload Deployer v3.1 actually had benefits for Virtual System patterns as well. In that case I was talking about the ability to deploy Virtual Applications running on AIX to PowerVM hypervisors and how this had hidden benefits for Virtual Systems as well. This is a great example of how an enhancement to Virtual Applications can sometimes benefit Virtual Systems. However, this is not the only instance where the two pattern types intersect.

Several other new or enhanced features that are primarily for Virtual Applications are also being extended to benefit and improve Virtual Systems ... and vice-versa. One such area of improvement involves Shared Service in v3.1. These services were introduced in v3.0 specifically for the benefit of Virtual Applications. However, several enhancements have extended these capabilities to Virtual Systems and likewise, some functionality that was previously only available to Virtual Systems has been extended to Virtual Applications in the form of Shared Services.

As you may already know, Shared Services were first introduced in v3.0 and are just what the name implies; services that are deployed by a cloud administrator and used by multiple virtual application deployments. Let's start by taking a look at the shared services available under Cloud -> Shared Services in v3.1. You will notice that there are now more shared services listed than there were in v3.0.

In addition to the familiar Caching Service and ELB Proxy Service (formerly Proxy Service) there are now additional entries for an External Caching Service and an External Application Monitoring Service. For simplicity let's just start from the top and go down the list, discussing the function of each service, what is new/improved for v3.1 with regard to virtual applications, and when applicable how this service can be used by virtual systems.

Caching Service

The Caching Service was introduced in v3.0. Its primary purpose is to cache HTTP session data using a highly scalable and fast in-memory cache. This is the same core technology that is included in our WebSphere eXtreme Scale and DataPower XC10 Caching appliance. To make use of this service all you need to do is deploy an instance of the Caching Service with the configuration parameters of your choice into a cloud group where you want to leverage that service. As you create virtual application patterns you simply select the Enable session caching check-box when you add a scaling policy. When this pattern is deployed it will be automatically configured to leverage the Caching Service for session persistence. It's as simple as that.

Several new features were introduced in v3.1 for the Caching Service. First, the Caching Service can now be launched with parameters to define the behavior for automatic scaling to meet the ever changing demands of your applications. Once set, Workload Deployer will manage this service to ensure sufficient capacity based upon your requirements, adding or removing containers. Second, and this is significant for Virtual System patterns, the caching service has been enhanced to add new operations to support listing, creating, and deleting various types of object grids. You can then use the WebSphere eXtreme Scale ObjectGrid APIs to persist and manage content in the grid from your application code from Virtual System deployments. This saves you the trouble of creating and configuring your own caching service for these purposes outside of the cloud and permits sharing of the service you have already configured - a nice savings.

Caching Service (External)

The External Caching Service is one of the new additions for v3.1. Let's say that you already have configured a caching solution for your enterprise using the DataPower XC10 appliance or a collective of appliances. It would be nice if you could leverage this same solution instead of launching yet another caching solution within your private cloud. Leveraging your existing solution would consolidate your caching needs and preserve the cloud resources for other purposes. With this new external caching service you can do just that. It provides you the ability to leverage an external caching solution for both your Virtual Application session persistence needs as well as your Virtual System and even non-cloud caching needs. Just point an instance of this external caching service at your DataPower XC10 caching solution and all of the HTTP session persistence needed by your virtual applications in the same cloud group will make use of the external caching service. You can also point multiple instances of the external caching service in multiple cloud groups to share the same XC10 appliance or collective.

Monitoring Application (External)

With the External Monitoring Application service you can deploy an External Application Monitoring service reference within a cloud group to point at a Tivoli Enterprise Monitoring Server installation outside of the cloud. The TEMS server must be at version 6.2.2 Fix Pack 5 or later. Once created, the Unix or Linux OS monitoring agents and the Workload monitoring agent that is provided for virtual application workloads will be automatically connected to the defined instance of the Tivoli server using the supplied primary and fail-over Tivoli Enterprise Management server, protocol, and port. This is especially useful if you want to consolidate all of your monitoring to a common console. As with the External Caching Solution, this enhancement also extends the integration capabilities of Virtual Application Patterns beyond the scope of your private cloud and allows you to consolidate and leverage investments you have already made.

ELB Proxy Service

The Proxy Service was first introduced in v3.0 and renamed to the ELB Proxy Service in v3.1 for clarity. As the name implies, its primary purpose is to provide routing and load balancing to multiple deployed web applications. As with the caching service, you deploy this service based upon your requirements for load and availability within a cloud group. When defining virtual application patterns to leverage this service you simply add a routing policy and define your virtual host name. When the virtual application pattern instance is deployed to the cloud group the necessary configuration will performed to add the virtual host name and configure your application environment to use the ELB Proxy Service. New in v3.1 is the capability to scale the ELB Proxy Service itself to meet the changing demands of your application mix.

One other item that I should point out (and to which I've already alluded) is that you can now deploy multiple instances of each of the shared services - one per cloud group. Shared services can also now be deployed using environment profiles. This was not previously the case in v3.0 where each service was a singleton for the appliance. Allowing multiple instances of shared services gives you the flexibility to configure the sharing of your services as necessary for your particular environment.

I hope this post has provided a useful overview of the value of shared services and the new capabilities introduced in v3.1. I also hope that you can see how these services make it easier to implement your solutions for both virtual applications and virtual systems within a private cloud environment and shed a little light on how we are continuing to improve IBM Workload Deployer. As always, these improvements are driven by the feedback we receive from you so please let us know what you think!

When IBM Workload Deployer V3.0 was introduced last year, one of the "hidden" values that it delivered was a base image used for virtual application patterns. I say "hidden" because this image, while delivered primarily for use in virtual application patterns, could also be leveraged for virtual system patterns. By now you may be scratching your head and wondering just what I'm talking about. Let me explain...

To begin with, it is helpful to understand a little bit about how virtual applications are deployed and how that differs from virtual system patterns. As you may already know, virtual system patterns are built from IBM Hypervisor Edition images to launch the virtual machines for your deployment. The IBM Hypervisor Edition images include the Operating System and middleware components together in the image. Therefore, building a virtual system pattern basically starts with a fairly complete image and activates the parts in that image necessary to fulfill the particular role this virtual machine will pay in a virtual system pattern. Virtual application patterns take a somewhat different approach. The starting point for a virtual application pattern is the base image which only includes the base Operating System. Workload Deployer launches a virtual machine with just this base image and then the appliance manages installation, configuration, and integration of software and applications to complete the role this virtual machine must fulfill for this virtual application pattern. At a high level you could consider virtual system patterns a template approach and virtual application patterns more of a build it as you need it approach.

So just what is the "hidden" value of these base images provided for virtual application patterns and how can that be used for virtual system patterns? The hidden value is that the base images used for virtual application patterns are delivered with IBM Workload Deployer in the image catalog and can be used for building virtual system patterns. If you already have an appliance you can take a look ... you will see the base images there under Catalog > Virtual Images right along side more familiar images like the IBM Hypervisor Edition images for WebSphere Application Server. For x86 systems this image is appropriately named "IBM Workload Deployer Image for x86 Systems". These images each include a base part called "Core OS" that can be included in a virtual system pattern.

So now you may be saying to yourself - well that's all great news but what is new about this? The new thing is that in IBM Workload Deployer V3.1 a significant new feature was added - the ability to deploy virtual application images to PowerVM environments using AIX. To enable that feature a base image was created for AIX, the "IBM OS Image for AIX Systems." As with the x86 image, this new image is now also available for your use in the image catalog. You can now employ that default AIX image for your own needs in virtual systems patterns - creating a very nice extension mechanism for PowerVM and AIX users.

This new base image contains the IBM AIX 6100-05 operating system and the Core OS part that you can include in virtual system patterns. As with the x86 base image delivered earlier, there are no restrictions on how you use or customize this image. To make it suitable for your purposes you can employ the IBM Workload Deployer extend and capture capability to install additional software content into the image. You can also enhance this image using the IBM Image Construction and Composition Tool (ICCT) that is now included with IBM Workload Deployer v3.1. When you include this part in a virtual system pattern you can also associate any configuration scripts that you may need, just as you would with any other part. Just as with the x86 part - this provides substantial value and a significant convenience for AIX users.

I hope this clues you in on the "hidden" benefits of a substantial new feature included in IBM Workload Deployer V3.1. We have often been asked to provide base OS images to build upon as starting from scratch is sometimes difficult when you need to create your own custom image. Now, with IBM Workload Deployer v3.1, you have your choice of two default images in addition to the many IBM Hypervisor Edition images delivered as well as a robust set of new features in IBM Workload Deployer V3.1!

In the previous post Dustin shared a great video demonstrating the value of the IBM Image Construction and Composition Tool that is now delivered with IBM Workload Deployer V3.1. This is certainly one of the key new features of IBM Workload Deployer V3.1. However, there are also a number of other compelling enhancements and features that we would like communicate.

I created the attached video to highlight some of these features included in new Workload Deployer release. The video uses the web console to highlight some of the features and capabilities, giving a brief introduction for each one. Without going into a lot of depth, I think it gives a nice overview. This may be especially helpful if you already have Workload Deployer v3.0 and want to see the value you will get when you upgrade to Workload Deployer v3.1. Check it out.

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We believe that these new features make IBM Workload Deployer V3.1 an even better solution for your private cloud needs. Please let us know what you think.

Lately Joe and I have been pretty vocal about bringing up the new IBM Image Construction and Composition Tool capabilities in IBM Workload Deployer v3.1. While writing about such new capabilities is always good, I think seeing is believing. In that light, I hope you will take a look at the recent demo I put together that shows how to use the Image Construction and Composition Tool with IBM Workload Deployer v3.1!

In a recent post, Joe Bohn detailed some of the new capabilities and enhancements that come along with the recently delivered IBM Workload Deployer v3.1. To be sure, there are many valuable new features such as PowerVM support for virtual application patterns, the Plugin Developer Kit, WebSphere Application Server Hypervisor Edition v8, and more. Each of these topics probably merit their own post, but today I want to talk about something I did not mention above. Specifically, I want to talk about the announcements regarding the IBM Image Construction and Composition Tool (ICCT) and what that means for IBM Workload Deployer users.

You may have read an earlier post that I wrote about the ICCT, but allow me a brief overview here. In short, the ICCT enables the construction of custom virtual images for use in IBM Workload Deployer. You use the tool to create virtual images, much like IBM Hypervisor Edition images, and then you can use those custom images (containing whatever content you need) to create your own custom virtual system patterns. The key point about the custom images you create with the ICCT is that they are dynamically configurable. That is, the tool helps you to create the images in such a way that you can defer configuration until deploy time rather than burning such configuration directly into an image. For those of you familiar with virtual image creation, you know this type of 'intelligent construction' is a huge step towards keeping image inventory at a reasonable level.

Okay, enough of a general overview for now. Let's talk about the two new items of note regarding IBM Workload Deployer v3.1 and the ICCT. The first thing you should know is that starting in IBM Workload Deployer v3.1, the ICCT is shipped with the appliance. This means that you do not need to go anywhere else in order to get your hands on the tool to start creating your custom images. You simply log into IBM Workload Deployer and click the download link on the appliance's welcome panel (shown in image below).

Getting your hands on the tool is one piece of the puzzle, but using it is quite another. While the ICCT has been available as an alphaWorks project for some time, that also implies that there has never been official support for the tool. That changes starting with IBM Workload Deployer v3.1. The ICCT is now a generally available product from IBM, and that means that it is fully and officially supported as well. Further, the images you create using the tool are also officially supported for use as building blocks of your IBM Workload Deployer virtual system patterns. For many of you who have been using the ICCT for some time, but have been hesitant to expand use because of the lack of a formal support statement, you should now feel free to charge forward!

I hope this helps clear up exactly what the new Image Construction and Composition Tool announcements that were part of IBM Workload Deployer v3.1 actually mean. I cannot wait to hear about how you all are putting the ICCT to use with IBM Workload Deployer. Finally, don't forget to send us any questions, comments, or other feedback that you may have regarding this or any other new feature in IBM Workload Deployer v3.1!

IBM Workload Deployer v3.1 firmware has been released and is available for download. V3.1 includes many improvements, building upon the solid foundation that was laid in V3.0 and earlier releases of WCA. There are many improvements and enhanced features. Dustin already alluded to a few of these in his previous post but let me list again here some of the more prominent new features:

The ground breaking capabilities offered in our Virtual Application Patterns have been extended to include deployments for AIX on PowerVM - giving you more choices for your private cloud environment. Along with this support a new base operating system image for AIX is also available for extension using either extend and capture or the IBM Image Construction and Composition Tool. Of course, Virtual System Patterns continue to be supported on all three private cloud hypervisors we support: VMWare, PowerVM, and zVM.

A new version of the Web Application Pattern Type (formerly WebApp Pattern Type) has been released. The Web Application Pattern Type V2.0 is built upon the feature rich WebSphere Application Server V8.0 release.

The DBaaS Pattern Type has been updated and is now the IBM Database Patterns 1.1 which includes both the IBM Data Mart Pattern 1.1 and the IBM Transactional Database Pattern 1.1 (OLTP - the default). These pattern types support a broader range of offerings for both production and non-production use. You can choose to create a new type of workload standard to apply to the DB instance or you can choose to clone an existing DB image that has been backed up to your DB image catalog repository.

A number of improvements have been made to the shared services leveraged by Virtual Application patterns. The caching service used to persist session data when scaling a web application can itself now be configured to scale, adjusting to increased demand. We have also extended the shared services to support external caching services and to leverage an external monitoring service based upon Tivoli Enterprise Monitoring Server (TEMS). You can also deploy multiple instances of shared services by deploying to multiple cloud groups.

The Plugin Developer Kit that was previously released to support building your own plugins and pattern types for Virtual Application patterns is now available for download directly from the IBM Workload Deployer dashboard - making it even easier to gain access and experience using this extension mechanism to deliver your own custom plugins and pattern types.

Images created using the IBM Image Construction and Composition Tool are now fully supported in IBM Workload Deployer V3.1 Virtual System patterns. Furthermore, the IBM Image Construction and Composition Tool is now a generally available product that is fully supported and available for download directly from the IBM Workload Deployer dashboard.

Speaking of Virtual System Patterns - a new hypervisor edition image of WebSphere Application Server V8 is now delivered with the appliance. WebSphere Application Server V8 fully supports the JavaEE6 programming model and includes many other programming models directly in the base image that were previously delivered only as feature packs including OSGi, JPA, and many more.

One item already mentioned by Dustin is the ability to configure multiple IBM Workload Deployer appliances in a master/slave relationship with a floating IP address to support continuous availability in the event that the master become unavailable. This feature can also be leveraged to support continuous operation while performing maintenance.

Another key appliance improvement is increased appliance security through the introduction of several new security roles for separation of duties. This is to ensure that no single user has unrestricted control without oversight. Among the new roles is an auditing role and auditing operations to provide data for forensic analysis of security attacks and better assist with compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX).

We believe that these new features and several more make the value proposition delivered by IBM Workload Deployer V3.1 an even more compelling offering that can increase agility, consistency, and time to value for your applications. You can download IBM Workload Deployer V3.1 from IBM Fix Central. Please let us know what you think!

If you follow this blog often, you know that from time to time I like to post frequently asked questions. Well, it's been a while since I have done that, and since then I have added some new questions to my list -- along with some regulars. Take a look below, and if I don't answer your question feel free to leave a comment!

Can IBM Workload Deployer deploy software that is not IBM software?Yes. You can use one of the included images as a springboard and customize them with your own software via extend and capture. Additionally, you can use the IBM Image Construction and Composition Tool (I'm getting ahead of myself here) to create your own custom images from the ground up and use those within IBM Workload Deployer.

Can I use VMotion for the systems I deploy with IBM Workload Deployer?Yes. IBM Workload Deployer has tolerated the use of VMotion since the WebSphere CloudBurst days (see the Additional Considerations section on this page for more information). IBM Workload Deployer v3 introduced the notion of virtual machine mobility initiated directly from the appliance. This capability takes advantage of VMotion in the case of VMware-based cloud environments.

Can IBM Workload Deployer deploy just a base operating system?Yes. IBM Workload Deployer v3 introduced a base operating system image that contains 64-bit Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Internally, IBM Workload Deployer uses this as the foundation on top of which virtual application patterns are deployed. You can use it to deploy virtual machines containing just the base OS, or you can customize it to deploy software of your choosing. (As an aside, IBM Workload Deployer v3.1 will include a base operating system image for AIX)

Can I automate the process of calling/using IBM Workload Deployer?Yes. IBM Workload Deployer is built to fit a specific need -- creating and managing a cloud of middleware and middleware-based workloads. In that light, it would be a shortcoming if IBM Workload Deployer did not to fit well into more holistic or enterprise-wide cloud management systems. The REST API and CLI allow you to automate the use of IBM Workload Deployer, thereby allowing it to be mashed up into other processes.

Can I group two appliances together for high availability?Yes. IBM Workload Deployer v3.1 introduces the ability to configure appliances in a master/slave setup. You can connect two appliances, allow them to share a floating IP address, and be confident that data is continuously replicated between the two. If one appliance fails, the other appliance picks up the floating IP ensuring continuous service.

Are images created using the Image Construction and Composition Tool supported for use within IBM Workload Deployer?Yes. Part of the new IBM Workload Deployer 3.1 announcement was a statement of support for using images created by the Image Construction and Composition Tool as a component of your virtual system patterns. This is a very important enhancement as it allows you to extend the set of content deployed by IBM Workload Deployer while being sure that you are operating within the boundaries of intended use.

Can I use IBM Workload Deployer to provision to public clouds?No... and yes. If you install an IBM Workload Deployer appliance in your datacenter, you cannot use it to deploy to a public cloud environment. However, you may have recently heard about the IBM SmartCloud Application Services portfolio. IBM has announced that the pattern-based provisioning that one gets with IBM Workload Deployer will also be available as part of this portfolio. This means that you will be able to build and deploy patterns using a service hosted on the IBM SmartCloud. Further, your deployed systems will run on the IBM SmartCloud. Check out this demo for more information.

One of the things that often comes up at some point in IBM Workload Deployer conversations is the notion of self-service access. Specifically, users want to know what the appliance provides that enables them to allow various teams in their organization to directly deploy the middleware environments they need. In other words, they want to use IBM Workload Deployer to tear down the traditional barriers that exist between those that request the environment and those that fulfill said request. Now, as we begin to elaborate on this notion, it becomes quickly apparent that in order to effectively enable self-service, IBM Workload Deployer must deliver a few things.

First, IBM Workload Deployer must provide the means to define users with various levels of access. Second, IBM Workload Deployer must provide the means to define resource access at a fine-grained level to different users and groups of users. Check and check. The appliance has been doing this since the beginning of WebSphere CloudBurst. Without those two things, the conversation of self-service access would end pretty quickly. However, there is a final capability that is equally important: IBM Workload Deployer must deliver a means to limit resource consumption at a fine-grained level.

In IBM Workload Deployer there are a couple of ways to achieve this. First, you could define multiple cloud groups and allow access to those groups in a way that maps directly to resource entitlements. While that may work in some situations, others call for even more granularity. You may want to allow multiple different users or groups to access a cloud group, but you may want to allow different consumption limits for each of these groups. In this situation, you can take advantage of environment profiles and a new option when defining users of IBM Workload Deployer.

Consider the case that you have a group of developers and you want to limit their consumption of memory in the cloud. First, you start by defining your development users and for each you select Environment Profile Only as the value for the Deployment Options field.

By selecting the above value for the deployment options of a user, you restrict that user to only deploying via an environment profile as opposed to general cloud group deployments. After defining all of your development users, you may choose to organize them into a user group for easier management. At that point, you can define environment profiles and determine which ones your developers should have access to using the Access granted to field of the profile.

Within the environment profile, you can define resource consumption limits for compute resource and software licenses. For instance, you can define a limit on the amount of virtual memory consumed by all deployments using the profile. It is important to note that the limit is cumulative for ALL deployments that use the profile.

Now that all of the controls are in place, consider the deployment process for one of your development users. They pick a virtual system pattern, click the deploy icon and begin to configure the pattern for deployment. In the Choose Environment section of the deployment dialog, your development user will only be able to select the Choose profile option for deployment. Further, they will only be able to deploy using the environment profiles to which they have access.

After the deployment completes, a look at the Environment limits section in the profile shows the current usage totals.

Now suppose another development user, or even the same one, comes along and attempts to deploy another virtual system pattern even though the profile limits have already been reached. The user can initiate the deployment, but they will get a near immediate failure owing to the fact that they would exceed consumption limits if the deployment were allowed to proceed.

The same kind of enforcement occurs regardless of the resource limit type. You can use this approach to limit the consumption of CPU, virtual memory, storage, or software licenses among the various different users or groups of users you define in IBM Workload Deployer. If you combine fine-grained resource consumption limits with varying permissions and fine-grained access, I think you are on the road to truly enabling self-service in the enterprise.

A couple of weeks ago, I dropped by the Intel Developer Forum to present a session and listen in on a few others. As always in these types of shows, I learned quite a bit. Most strikingly though, I was reminded of something that is probably quite obvious to many of you: Consumer interest in cloud computing will not be letting up any time soon.

Based on this, and some of the other things I heard at the show, I decided to catch up with fellow IBMer Marc Haberkorn. Marc is an IBM Product Manager and is responsible for IBM Workload Deployer amongst other things. I asked him about IBM Workload Deployer, the competition, and cloud in general. Check out what Marc had to say below:

Me:IBM Workload Deployer is one among many of a growing wave of cloud management solutions. How do you differentiate the focus and business value of it versus the myriad of other solutions out there?

Marc: To sum it up, we offer a combination of depth and breadth. IWD delivers both workload aware management and general purpose management. Workload aware management differentiates IWD from its competition, as it can deliver more value for the set of products for which it has context. There is a set of actions that workload aware management tools can do that is normally left to the user by general purpose management tools. This list includes configuring a middleware server to know its hostname/IP address, configuring multiple middleware servers to know of one another, arranging clusters, applying maintenance, and handling elasticity. By handling more of these activities in the automated flow, there are fewer chances for manual errors and inconsistencies to enter a managed environment.

That said, without infinite resource or time, it’s impossible to deliver this context-aware management for everything under the sun. As such, in order to allow IWD to deliver differentiated value AND allow it to handle a customer's entire environment, we offer a mix of workload-aware management and general purpose management.

Me:VMware is a good example of a company active in the cloud space, and they seem to keep a consistent pace of new product delivery. What do you think of their product development focus?

Marc: I think VMware has built a very compelling set of capability in the virtualization space. I think the main difference between VMware's suite and IBM Workload Deployer is the perspective from which the environments are managed. VMware puts the administrator in the position of thinking about infrastructure from the ground up. The administrator is thinking about virtual images, hypervisors, and scripts. In IBM Workload Deployer, we think about things from the perspective of the app, because that's ultimately what the business cares about. By providing a declarative model through which an application can be instantiated and managed, we feel we deliver a deeper value proposition to clients, through workload-aware management.

Me:The 'one tool to do it all' approach is a popular, if not hard to achieve goal. What is your advice to users when it comes to choosing between breadth and depth for cloud management solutions?

Marc: The advantages of a "one tool to do it all" are many: less integration, more uniformity, less complexity. As such, customers will always prefer a single tool when possible. This is why IBM Workload Deployer has focused on not only providing differentiated, deeper value for common use cases but also providing a way to handle the "everything else." As such, my advice to users is not to choose between breadth and depth - use IBM Workload Deployer which offers both.

Me:To close, I'm curious to know where you think we are heading in the cloud market. What do you think users will be most readily adopting over the next one to two years? Where does the cloud industry need the most innovation?

Marc: I think most users are currently looking at the broad picture of cloud computing, and have been adopting primarily in the private cloud realm. There are several reasons for this. One reason is that many customers have a large set of hardware resources which amount to sunk cost that needs to be leveraged. Another reason is around data security concerns in off-premises clouds, and still another reason is around the human factor of comfort, which has taken time to develop around off-premise cloud models. However, businesses have become increasingly comfortable with various sources of outsourcing in recent years, especially in mission critical areas involving very sensitive data. Just look at IBM's Strategic Outsourcing business, which handles entire IT operations for many large businesses. I think that trend will (and really, has already begun to) continue in the area of cloud computing, and will lead to more public and ultimately hybrid cloud computing adoption. In order to get to hybrid cloud computing, I see much of the focus and innovation being associated with data security, workload portability (across private and public, in a seamless fashion), and license transferability between private and public. When this space reaches fruition, clients will be able to enjoy true elastic economics in a computing model that allows a mixture of owning and renting compute resources and software licenses.

Sorry for the late notice - but I just realized that I hadn't blogged about a webcast that I am participating in tomorrow (Tuesday, 9/13)!

Chris Brealey (a Senior Technical Staff Member and Rational Enterprise Architect) and I are hosting an InformationWeek WebCast tomorrow (Tuesday, 9/13) entitled "Quickly and Efficiently Design, Develop, Deploy, and Test Workload Application Patterns to Save Months and Millions". I encourage you to register now for this free event (or if you can't make it tomorrow listen to it at your convenience as it will be recorded ... but you still need to register).

I'm really looking forward to this webcast. IBM Workload Deployer's predecessor, WebSphere Cloudburst Appliance, delivered unmatched capabilities for middleware deployments and management using Virtual System patterns (topology) - delivering complete middleware topologies in a rapid, consistent, and repeatable fashion. This has greatly improved the ability of development and test organizations to meet the ever increasing demands of today's agile development processes in addition to the assurance it provides for production environments. All of that value is still present (and improved) in IBM Workload Deployer but there is even more value in the new Virtual Application Patterns, as we've mentioned in previous posts.

Virtual Applications build upon this same notion of consistency and speed found in Virtual Systems while at the same time introducing a radical simplification to hosting your applications. Using an application-centric, declarative approach with Virtual Applications (workloads) it is even easier to deliver your applications rapidly leaving Workload Deployer to ensure the middleware environment is constructed and optimized to meet your application criteria. Virtual Applications usher IBM Workload Deployer into the realm of Platform-as-a-Service ... with even greater simplicity and agility to host your application in the most efficient fashion. As with Virtual System patterns earlier, we expect the introduction of Virtual Applications to continue to improve the dev/test lifecycle as well as production. The robust capabilities of Rational Application Developer and the simplicity of Virtual Application patterns in Workload Deployer make for a great combination.

I will start off the webcast with a discussion of PaaS and IBM Workload Deployer Virtual Application patterns. Chris will then discuss the application development process and how that is influenced with the introduction of the cloud environment. Chris will then explore the integration that is available in Rational Application Developer for IBM Workload Deployer. Finally, we will walk through a scenario that demonstrates how to leverage Virtual Application patterns in IBM Workload Deployer to design a solution that is then shared with the developer. Using Rational Application Developer the developer delivers the application into the pattern and moves it to test and finally pre-production. We will end with a question and answer time. I hope you can join us as we explore how we can use these technologies to increase agility and efficiency.

Script packages are an integral part of virtual system patterns in IBM Workload Deployer. By attaching script packages to your patterns, you provide customizations particular to your unique cloud-based middleware environments. Customizations provided by script packages might include installing applications, creating application resources, integrating with external enterprise systems, and much more. The bottom line is, if you are creating virtual system patterns, you will almost certainly be creating script packages.

Largely, the act of creating a script package is independent of IBM Workload Deployer. The appliance does not dictate a particular scripting language, so all you need to do is make sure you can invoke your logic in the operating system environment. Your script package may be a wsadmin script, shell script, Java program, Perl script, and on and on. After you create the actual contents of your script package, you will then load that asset into the IBM Workload Deployer catalog.

Once loaded into the catalog, you define several attributes of your script package, including the executable command, command arguments, variables, execution time, and more. The process for defining these attributes is trivial using the intuitive UI in IBM Workload Deployer, but I wanted to take a little time to remind you of a technique I recommend to all users defining script packages. You can actually package a JSON file within the script package that defines all of the script's attributes. The format of the file is simple, and I am including an example below:

The example above is one taken from a script package in our samples gallery, and it shows the basics of which you need to be aware. Notice that in the JSON file, you can provide a name, description, unzip location, executable command, command arguments, variables, and more. You only need to ensure that the name of this JSON file is cbscript.json and that you include it at the root of the script package archive. Once you have done that, you load the script package archive into the catalog, refresh the script package details, and voila -- all the attribute definitions appear!

You may ask why I recommend this since it could seem like an unnecessary step. My answer to that is that you have to define these attributes anyway, so you might as well capture it once in the file. Once you capture it once in the file, you can ensure that if the same script needs to be reloaded, or if you need to move it to another appliance, its definition will be exactly the same (and presumably correct). I use this approach for all of my work, and for all of the samples I contribute to our gallery, and it really saves me a lot of misplaced effort that can result from typos. If you are out there creating script packages, try adopting this approach. I'm pretty sure you will be happy you did!

We've begun to seed this location with all sorts of helpful information on IBM Workload Deployer. Check it out and you will find links to a "getting started" section, articles, demos, redbooks, whitepapers, pointers to various blogs where authors write about private clouds or IBM Workload Deployer (yep, this blog is included), links to product documentation and education assistant, upcoming events, and more included in the wiki. We're still populating this location with content and we're looking for input on how to improve things ... so please provide your feedback and check back often to see how it evolves.

The content provided in the community is open and visible to everyone immediately. However, there is even more value if you create an id (or use your existing developerWorks id) to become a member of the community. Members can participate in the many collaborative elements that the community provides. This includes the ability to open discussions and collaborate on the forum, post blog entries in the IBM Workload Deployer community blog, or even share content that you have created which may be of interest to others.

There is even a specific section in the community focused on the Plugin Developer's Kit that Dustin mentioned in the previous post on extensibility ( see IBM Workload Deployer PDK wiki page ).

So please visit this new IBM Workload Deployer community and send us your feedback so that we can improve and grow this into a valuable resource. Ultimately, we want this to be a place where we can help each other be successful using IBM Workload Deployer. We also want to learn valuable insights from your experiences with IBM Workload Deployer so that we can continue to make improvements and optimizations in the appliance with the goal of improving your private cloud experience, making your business more agile and efficient. As always, please send us your feedback.

Customization capabilities have been very important to the design of IBM Workload Deployer going back to the beginning with WebSphere CloudBurst. Having the ability to quickly spin up environments in a cloud really does little good if those environments are not customized according to your needs. If you look at the virtual system pattern capability, it is why we always had the notion of custom images, custom patterns, and custom scripts. We give you a strong foundation, and you tweak it here and there to create what you want.

Customization is not a concept unique to virtual system patterns. The virtual application model in IBM Workload Deployer supports many different mechanisms for you to tailor your cloud-based environments. You can start with the virtual application pattern types that we ship and use any components in those patterns to build a custom environment. The patterns you build can include your own configuration (within the set of configurable parameters) and include policies that you need for your environment. In looking at just the IBM Workload Deployer Pattern for Web Applications and the IBM Workload Deployer Pattern for Databases, there are quite a number of scenarios you can support with your cloud. However, what happens when you want to go a little further and color outside the lines of what we provide?

At some point you may have heard or read that the entire virtual application pattern model resides on a pluggable architecture. In effect, this means that everything about a virtual application pattern type, from the elements that show up when building a pattern to the management interface you interact with after deployment, is customizable. The fundamental unit of customization for a virtual application pattern type is a plugin. Plugins provide the know-how in terms of installing, configuring, integrating, and managing the application types supported by a given pattern. Plugins also provide metadata that control what users see as they build and manage these patterns. In short, plugins are the source of truth for virtual application patterns!

If you looked in IBM Workload Deployer, you would find the collection of plugins that support the virtual application pattern types shipped with the offering. While that is interesting, you should also know that you can supply your own plugins. That's right. You can develop a plugin, and load it directly into the appliance. This allows you to do two very important things. First, you can extend the virtual application pattern types that come with IBM Workload Deployer with any kind of functionality you deem important. This may be additional monitoring, integration with external systems, or any number of other extensions. Second, you can create new virtual application pattern types that support your desired workloads. You can support the workloads with the software of your choosing so long as you can supply the necessary know-how in your plugins. In either case, you contribute the plugin, and your customized components become first class members of the IBM Workload Deployer landscape.

Okay, so I admit that this is not necessarily news. We have supported user-contributed plugins since the release of IBM Workload Deployer. However, there is something new that significantly lowers the barrier to entry in the custom plugin game. Early last week, IBM announced the IBM Workload Plugin Development Kit. This kit provides a set of tools and samples designed to make the construction and packaging of custom plugins a simple process. In my opinion, this reiterates our commitment to an extensible, application-centric cloud approach, and it represents a huge step forward in the industry as a whole. Be sure to check this out, and don't be shy with the comments and feedback!

As Joe mentioned in his last post, virtual application patterns are all the rage in IBM Workload Deployer. The high degree of abstraction provided by these patterns means users can remove tedious, time consuming tasks like middleware installation, configuration, and integration from their field of view. As a consequence, users can build and deploy application environments in unprecedented time, thus freeing up more time to focus on the actual application.

This is obviously important because building and deploying application environments are crucial, traditionally time consuming activities. However, what happens after you build and deploy the application? You manage it, that's what! Joe brought up the fact that IBM Workload Deployer makes this easier too by delivering an integrated management portal through which you can manage and monitor your application environments. Now, this probably already sounds valuable, but what really puts it over the top is the management portal exposes an interface that is workload aware. But, what does that mean?

To get an idea of what that means, consider the case that you use the shipped virtual application pattern to build a simple application environment with a web application and database. You deploy it with IBM Workload Deployer, and your application is up and ready. Now you want to start checking things out. You start by opening the management portal directly from the appliance, and you see both the application and database components listed in the view:

After you looked at basic machine statistics such as network activity and memory usage, you could move on to a more workload-centric view. For instance, you could examine statistics particular to a web application such as request counts and service response times:

You may also decide that you want to alter certain aspects of your deployed environment. As an example, you could update your deployed application or change certain configuration data in the deployed environment:

It is important to note that you have a management interface for each of the components in your environment. That means that from the same management interface, you can manage and monitor the database you deployed as part of your environment. For example, at different intervals, you may want to backup your database. You can do this directly from the management portal provided by IBM Workload Deployer:

Lest you think that you can only manage and monitor, this unique management interface is also a one stop shop for all of your troubleshooting needs. From the centralized portal, you can view log and trace data for each component:

Virtual application patterns are an attempt to encapsulate each phase of your application's lifecycle, from creation to deployment to management. In this regard, I hope the above provides a taste of some of the management capabilities provided by virtual application patterns. It truly is the tip of the iceberg!

Virtual Application Patterns are one of the major new features in IBM Workload Deployer v3. You've heard this concept discussed on this blog before and it is really a revolutionary way to manage your applications in a private cloud environment. With Virtual Application Patterns you provide declarative information about your application including functional and non-functional requirements of that application. You get to focus on the application rather than the middleware configuration and IBM Workload Deployer takes care of all the details necessary to launch your application with the criteria you specify. This application-centric approach radically simplifies the deployment of applications in a private cloud. And it is not just the deployment that is simplified; it is also the monitoring, metering, logging, security, caching, etc ... that is consolidated and simplified as well. Everything is custom tailored for the particular application type to provide a significant level of integration and optimization for elastic, efficient, multi-tenant, automated management and execution of that application workload.

In IBM Workload Deployer v3 there are two different types of virtual application patterns provided out of the box; a pattern for web applications and a pattern for database applications. It's no accident that these are also the two most heavily utilized types of applications in most enterprises. Of course more patterns will be appearing in the future and you have the opportunity to create your own custom patterns ... but these first two patterns can cover a substantial number of current application workloads.

So why am I introducing all of this again? Well, I want to make you aware of a new article that was just published which covers virtual application patterns in a very consumable way with enough detail and screen shots to get you started down this path. It is appropriately named: Easy virtual app automation using Workload Deployer . It really does a great job of covering not only the web application pattern - but it also introduces the database pattern (DBaaS) and shared services. If you are about to embark on virtual applications this is a great place to start.

In a post not long ago, I mentioned new enhancements to virtual system patterns in IBM Workload Deployer. A prominent part of those enhancements were updates to pattern construction that allow you to order virtual machine startup, order script package invocation, and include add-ons that provide system level configuration options. Recently I uploaded a demonstration to YouTube that highlights some of these new capabilities. Specifically, this provides a brief look at ordering and add-on enhancements.

I hope you take a look, and even more importantly, I hope to see some feedback. If you have something you would like to see captured in a demo, let me know and I'll work it to the top of a long and continually growing list!

When it comes to IBM Workload Deployer, I have no illusions concerning our competitors. They are out there, and they are constantly on the attack. Their dubious claims aside, I know this because I still get asked quite frequently to explain the benefits of IBM Workload Deployer versus some other general purpose cloud provisioning and management solution. So, while I have done that many times in various forums, I figured it was time to address the subject here on the blog.

When comparing IBM Workload Deployer to the other available solutions, I honestly feel comfortable saying we have no direct competition. I know you believe me to be biased, and rightly so, but let me explain why I think the competition is much more perception than reality. To do this, I want to focus on the patterns-based approach that IBM Workload Deployer takes to cloud provisioning and management.

Let's start with virtual system patterns in IBM Workload Deployer. Virtual system patterns allow you to build and deploy completely configured and integrated middleware environments as a single unit. These patterns build on top of our special IBM Hypervisor Edition images that bottle up the installation and quite a bit of the configuration of the underlying middleware products. Further, when using virtual system patterns, IBM Workload Deployer manages and automates the orchestration of the integration tasks that need to happen to setup a meaningful middleware environment. For instance, when deploying WebSphere Application Server you do not need to do anything on your end to deploy a clustered, highly available environment. When deploying WebSphere Process Server in this manner, you do not need to take any administrative actions to produce a golden topology. You just deploy patterns and the images, patterns, and appliance take care of the rest. Of course, you can add your own customizations and tweaks in the pattern, but we take care of the common administrative actions that would otherwise require your care.

I am not sure of a better way to say it, so I will be blunt: When deploying products delivered in IBM Hypervisor Edition form, no other solution compares to the virtual system pattern capability offered by IBM Workload Deployer. It is not even close. Can you provision products like WebSphere Application Server or WebSphere Portal using other cloud provisioning tools? Sure, but you should be aware that you will be writing and maintaining your own installation, configuration, and integration scripts. It is also likely that you will end up developing a custom interface through which deployers request your services (something not necessary when using the slick IBM Workload Deployer UI). All of this takes time, resource, and money. More importantly, this is not differentiating work and distracts from the real end goal: serving up applications. IBM Workload Deployer can deliver this operational capability right out of the box, and it can do so in a way that costs less than custom developed and maintained solutions.

When considering IBM Workload Deployer versus the competition, it is also important to consider the new virtual application pattern capability delivered in version 3.0. The virtual application pattern capability is a testament to IBM's thought leadership in and commitment to cloud computing for middleware application environments. Virtual application patterns take a bold step forward in raising the level of abstraction beyond the middleware environment and up to the most important resource in enterprise environments: the application. With a virtual application pattern, you simply provide your application and specify both functional and non-functional requirements for that application. When ready, you deploy that pattern, and IBM Workload Deployer sets up the necessary middleware infrastructure and deploys the provided application. Moreover, the appliance will monitor and autonomically manage the environment (i.e. scale it up and down) based on the policies you specify. Quite simply, this is a deployment and management capability our competition cannot match.

There is more to consider than just patterns though. The appliance makes it really simple to apply maintenance and upgrades to environments running in your cloud. It can autonomically manage your deployed environments (through policies in virtual application patterns and the Intelligent Management Pack for virtual system patterns), and it effectively abstracts the underlying infrastructure of your cloud environment. This abstraction is the reason IBM Workload Deployer can deploy your environments to PowerVM, zVM, and VMware environments. It also makes it easy to deploy the same environment to multiple different underlying platforms, thus accommodating typical platform changes that happen as an application moves from development to production. The best part of all is that the deployer’s experience is the same regardless of the underlying infrastructure since the appliance hides any platform idiosyncrasies.

The bottom line is that the appliance is purpose built to deploy and manage middleware and middleware application environments in a cloud, and as such, delivers immense out-of-the-box and ongoing value in this context. I should also point out that the design of the appliance acknowledges its purposeful nature. The CLI and REST API interfaces allow you to integrate the appliance into the operations of those general purpose provisioning solutions. In this way, IBM Workload Deployer acts as a middleware accelerator for your cloud computing efforts. This means that if you do have a general purpose solution, IBM Workload Deployer can still provide considerable value and let you avoid developing a considerable subsystem dedicated to deployment and management of middleware in the cloud. We believe in this type of integration, and have in fact built it into our own IBM solutions.

I could go on and on differentiating IBM Workload Deployer from the competition, but I hope my comments above give you a good context on why I think the appliance is in a league of its own. Of course, I always appreciate comments and feedback, so don't be shy!

If you are reading this blog then I am pretty sure that you are interested in the agility that can be achieved by rapidly provisioning middleware systems and standing up virtual applications in a private cloud environment. However there are other aspects of agility that you should also consider. One such aspect is the ability to build applications that can be easily maintained, updated, and extended. This is where OSGi technology comes into the picture.

If you have been working with the IBM Workload Deployer (or watching some IBM Workload Deployer demos) you may have noticed a category of components in the virtual application builder called OSGi Components.

Maybe you already know all about OSGi applications and the value they bring to an enterprise. Or, perhaps you noticed this and decided that you would search for some more information on this odd acronym and just what an OSGi application is all about.

In a nutshell OSGi technology is a way to define dynamic modules for Java. It provides a standard way to encapsulate components (called bundles) with metadata that define versioned package dependencies, service dependencies, packages exported, services exported, etc... basically everything you need to know about this bundle so that it can be connected up with other bundles to support a particular solution. These bundles can then be grouped together into applications and dynamically wired to fulfill necessary dependencies at runtime. The OSGi framework provides all of the necessary capability to manage the dependencies and resolve any problems.

Those who leverage OSGi technology benefit from improved time-to-market and reduced development costs. The loose coupling provided by the OSGi framework reduces maintenance costs and facilitates the dynamic delivery of components in a running system. Of course there's a lot more to it than just that ... involving portability across different environments, achieving the appropriate level of isolation or sharing within an environment, and integrating with the many different technologies and patterns already available today. I don't think I know enough about OSGi to do it justice here. But fortunately for me (and you) there are several experts who can make it all clear.

One such expert is Graham Charters and there is a great opportunity to hear him introduce this topic and also participate in a dialogue about the concepts and what they mean for your business. Graham will be leading a Global WebSphere Community Lab Chat on Wednesday of this week (July 20th) entitled: How can OSGi make your enterprise more agile. Graham is the IBM technical lead in the OSGi Alliance Enterprise Expert Group and an active participant in the open source community implementing many of these standards. So register now for this free session and learn how OSGi can make your enterprise even more agile.

A few weeks ago, I had a conversation with a current WebSphere customer about the potential value they could derive from the use of IBM Workload Deployer. Right away, this customer saw value in the consistency that a patterns-based approach could afford them. It was clear that patterns eliminate the uncertainty that can make its way into even the best-planned deployment processes. Initially though, the customer questioned the value of being able to do fast deployments because, in their words, "We don't deploy WebSphere environments that often." So, we continued our discussion, and then they asked an important question that I encourage all of our users to ask: "Why don't we deploy our WebSphere environments more frequently?"

It is interesting to talk with our WebSphere users that have a long history with our products. Often times, they have been taking a shared approach to WebSphere installations for many, many years. They develop innovative approaches and isolation schemes that allow them to carve up a single WebSphere installation (cell) amongst multiple different application teams. This allows them to avoid having to setup a cell for each application deployment and saves them the associated time. However, having talked to many different users taking this approach, it is not without its challenges.

As was the case in the customer I mention above, users typically made trade-offs when electing for larger, shared cells. As an example, if you have multiple different application teams with different types of applications using a single cell, applying fixes and upgrades to that cell can be a lot more complex. After all, you now have to coordinate plans across a number of different teams and find a window that fits all of their needs. For the same reason, trying incremental function via our feature packs is much more arduous in these types of cells. Additionally, administrative controls become more complex since teams with varying needs all require administrative access. Admittedly, this gets simpler with newer fine-grained security models in WebSphere Application Server v7 and v8, but it still requires organizational discipline and process.

At this point I should be clear that I am not denigrating the shared cell approach. It can work well, and we have many facilities built into the WebSphere Application Server product to support that model. However, if you are using this approach and you find yourself stumbling too much for your own liking, then I would strongly suggest that you explore the patterns-based approach of IBM Workload Deployer. By deploying patterns that represent your WebSphere cells using IBM Workload Deployer, you can quickly and consistently setup multiple WebSphere Application Server cells to support the varying needs of your application teams. You will still avoid spending an inordinate amount of time installing and configuring cells as that is an automated part of pattern deployment, and your application teams will still get the resources they need. Further, this can liberate your application teams in terms of how they apply maintenance, install upgrades, and absorb new function in the form of feature packs.

I am not suggesting a complete pendulum swing in your approach to how you manage multiple application environments. There is definitely a happy medium in terms of how many cells you end up with. After all, you do not want to trade in one set of problems for the problem of managing way too many different cells. However, I do think that decomposing monolithic, multi-purpose cells into smaller, more purposeful cells can be beneficial. In the course of thinking about this different approach, you may come to the same conclusion that the customer I mention above did. IBM Workload Deployer's rapid deployment capabilities are indeed valuable if you take a slightly different view of current processes.

In my opinion, declarative deployment models are key to the entire notion of Platform as a Service (PaaS). That is, users should concern themselves with what they want, but not necessarily how to get it. The PaaS system should be able to interpret imperatives from the user and automatically convert that to a running system. In this respect, I think the new virtual application pattern, and more specifically policies, in IBM Workload Deployer takes a giant leap toward a more declarative deployment model.

In IBM Workload Deployer, policies allow you to 'decorate' your virtual application pattern with functional and non-functional requirements. In other words, they provide a vehicle for you to tell the system what qualities of service you expect for your application environment. To put a little context around this discussion, let's examine the policies available in the virtual application pattern for web applications. Specifically, let's look at the four policy types you can attach to Enterprise Application, Web Application, and OSGI Application components in this pattern:

Scaling policy: When it comes to cloud, the first thing many folks think about is autonomic elasticity. Applications should scale up and down based on criteria defined by the user. Well, that is exactly what the scaling policy lets you do. You simply attach this policy to your application component, and then specify properties that define when to scale. First, you choose a scaling trigger from a list that includes application response time, CPU usage, JDBC connection wait time, and JDBC connection pool usage. After choosing your trigger, you decide the minimum and maximum number of application instances for your deployment, and then you choose the minimum number of seconds to wait for an add or remove action. At this point, you can deploy your application and IBM Workload Deployer will monitor the environment, automatically triggering scaling actions as needed.

JVM policy: I would be willing to bet that nearly all of you tune the JVM environment into which you deploy your applications. The JVM policy allows you to take two common tuning actions, setting the JVM heap sizes and passing in JVM arguments, as well as attach a debugger to the Java process (especially useful in development and test phases). You can also use the policy to enable verbose garbage collection (invaluable to understanding heap usage patterns for your application) and select the bit level (from 32 or 64) for your application. Again, all you have to do is attach the policy and specify the properties. IBM Workload Deployer will take care of the required configuration updates.

Routing policy: The routing policy provides a simple way to specify virtual hostnames and allowable protocols (HTTP or HTTPS) for your application. Attach the policy, provide the virtual hostname you want to use, select the desired protocols, and that's it! Remember, once you set the virtual hostname you will need to update your name server to map the hostname to the appropriate IP address.

Log policy: During the development and test phase, it is likely that you will want to enable certain trace strings in the application runtime. The log policy allows you to provide trace strings for your application, and it makes sure that the appropriate configuration updates occur in the deployed environment.

While this is not an exhaustive explanation of each of the policies above, I hope it gives you a basic idea of what they are and how to use them. To me, declarative deployment models are going to be a crucial part of making PaaS successful, so I am really excited about the notion of policies in IBM Workload Deployer. What do you think?

We've been talking a lot about IBM Workload Deployer V3 and we will continue to highlight different aspects of the capabilities it provides in the coming weeks. As we've already mentioned - IBM® Workload Deployer V3 is not just another release of the IBM WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance. While it builds on WebSphere CloudBurst's success, and supports and improves upon all of its original capabilities, Workload Deployer provides new application-centric computing capabilities for your private cloud, and brings you higher utilization, improved ease of use, and more rapid application deployment.

I just wanted to point out a great opportunity for anybody considering leveraging IBM Workload Deployer v3 to deploy Database workloads. On June 29th Rav Ahuja, a Senior Product Manager for Data Management at IBM, will be hosting a webcast entitled "Easily Deploying Private Clouds for Database Workloads". He will be joined by Chris Gruber (Product Manager, Database as a Service), Leon Katsnelson (Program Director, IM Cloud Computing Center of Competence), and Sal Vella (Vice President, Database Development and Warehousing) in this panel discussion.

As many of you already know, IBM Workload Deployer v3 comes pre-loaded with DB2 images and patterns that are configured to rapidly provision standardized database servers for any number of purposes. The servers can be deployed in standalone configurations or as part of a complete virtual system including web components with the database components. These servers can also be configured for high availability scenarios. This panel discussion will cover all of these scenarios and more.

Among the major features of the new virtual application pattern in IBM Workload Deployer is the notion of elasticity. That is, as your application needs more resources, it gets them. When your application can meet its SLAs with fewer resources, the environment shrinks. With this kind of pattern, you enable elasticity by specifying a policy and defining the scaling trigger (i.e. CPU usage, application response times, database response times, etc.). What may have been a bit lost in some of these new announcements regarding IBM Workload Deployer is the fact that you can now leverage this core feature of cloud, elasticity, in your virtual system patterns.

If you have read this blog in the past, you probably already know that the Intelligent Management Pack is an option for virtual system patterns built using WebSphere Application Server Hypervisor Edition. When you enable the Intelligent Management Pack option, you are essentially building and deploying WebSphere Virtual Enterprise (WVE) environments. For those of you not familiar with WVE, the best way to describe it is that it provides you with application and application infrastructure virtualization capabilities. Of its many capabilities, one most germane to our discussion today is the ability for users to attach SLAs to applications and then have WVE automatically prioritize requests and manage resources in order to meet those SLAs. Inherent in this capability is the ability to dynamically start and stop application server processes (JVMs) as required. In other words, WVE provides JVM elasticity.

The fact that WVE provides JVM elasticity is nothing new. Further, IBM Workload Deployer started providing virtual machine (VM) elasticity in previous versions (when it was WebSphere CloudBurst). With this feature, you could add or remove VMs to an already deployed virtual system using dynamic virtual machine operations provided by the appliance. The catch was that the VM elasticity was a manual action and you could not link this elasticity to the same SLAs tied to your applications. Well, thanks to a new feature in WebSphere Virtual Enterprise and easy integration provided by the Intelligent Management Pack, this is no longer the case.

Starting in IBM Workload Deployer 3.0, you can take advantage of a new WVE feature called Elasticity Mode when using the Intelligent Management Pack. Elasticity mode is not unique to IBM Workload Deployer, but a concept new to the base WVE product. It allows one to define actions for how WVE should grow and shrink the set of nodes used by application server resources. Like the basic JVM elasticity capability in WVE, these node elasticity actions trigger based on SLAs tied to your applications. Consider the case that you are using elasticity mode and your application is not currently meetings its SLA. If WVE does not think it can start any more application server instances on the current set of nodes, it will grow the set of nodes per your elasticity configuration. Conversely, if WVE detects that it can meet SLAs with fewer nodes, it will shrink the resources per your elasticity configuration.

In IBM Workload Deployer, using elasticity mode becomes even easier. All you need to do is use the Intelligent Management Pack and enable the elasticity mode option in your virtual system patterns. When you do this, you get automatic integration between IBM Workload Deployer and the deployed WVE environment. What does that mean? It means that if WVE detects it needs more nodes, it will automatically call back into IBM Workload Deployer and request that the appliance provision a new VM that will serve as a node for application server processes. It also means that if WVE detects it could meet SLAs with fewer resources, it will call into IBM Workload Deployer and ask it to remove a node. All of this happens without any user scripting. All you have to do is enable this option in your patterns and configure SLAs appropriate for your applications.

To me, this exciting new feature brings out the best of elasticity capabilities in both IBM Workload Deployer and WebSphere Virtual Enterprise. The result is a single management plane that gives you both VM and JVM elasticity for your cloud-based application environments. Best of all, elasticity actions map directly to SLAs for your applications. After all, when it comes to cloud, it's the application that really matters!

The soon to be released IBM Workload Deployer is already being integrated with many IBM products. One of these is the Rational Application Developer. I created a short video demonstration of a simple scenario that includes multiple phases of an application from development to production using IBM Workload Deployer. The scenario starts with the Solutions Architect creating a workload application pattern for a stock trading application. It then moves to the developer working in Rational Application Developer and demonstrates this integration that allows the developer to access the workload pattern, publish the application that she has built in Rational Application Developer into the pattern, and then deploy the pattern to the test cloud. All of this without leaving the Rational Application Developer user interface. The scenario then continues with the test team adding policies and validating the application before the deployment manager finally makes some final adjustments and adds places the application into the production cloud.

As I have mentioned before, IBM Workload Deployer v3.0 introduces choices in pattern-based deployment models. One of those models, virtual system patterns, is a carry over from the WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance. When you use virtual system patterns in IBM Workload Deployer, you can take advantage of all of the techniques you put to use in WebSphere CloudBurst. This is certainly good news for current WebSphere CloudBurst users, but it goes a bit further. Instead of simply maintaining the status quo with virtual system patterns, which would have been reasonable considering the introduction of virtual application patterns, we chose to continue to expand on your customization options for this pattern deployment model. In particular, I want to discuss three new features in IBM Workload Deployer that may help you to better construct and manage virtual system patterns.

The first new feature is one that I have been eagerly awaiting. In the new version of the appliance, we provide you with the ability to specify part and script package ordering in your pattern. This means that, within the virtual system pattern editor, you can tell IBM Workload Deployer in which order to start the virtual machines in your pattern, and you can specify in which order to invoke the script packages within the pattern during deployment. This eliminates the need for special script invocation orchestration logic in your pattern (I had customers resorting to a semaphore like approach using a shared file system), and it allows you to be more declarative about the virtual machine bring-up process. There are constraints, specifically with the part ordering. Some images will impose an implied part start-up order that you cannot change. For instance, deployment manager parts in the WebSphere Application Server Hypervisor Edition image must start before custom node parts. The good news is the pattern editor will not allow you to specify a part start-up order that violates these constraints. The image below shows an example of the ordering view in the virtual system pattern editor.

Another new feature that may influence the way you build virtual system patterns is the introduction of Add-Ons. You can think of Add-Ons as special script packages that you can include in your virtual system pattern that perform system-level configuration actions. Specifically, you can include add-ons in your virtual system pattern to add an operating system user, add a virtual disk, or add a NIC during the deployment process. You include Add-Ons in your pattern by simply dragging and dropping them onto a part in your pattern, just as you do with script packages today. The difference between script packages and Add-Ons is that IBM Workload Deployer will ensure the invocation of all Add-Ons before any other scripts run during deployment. We include default Add-On implementations for adding a user, disk, and NIC.

The last new feature I want to talk about today has more to do with how you manage or govern the deployment of virtual system patterns. In WebSphere CloudBurst 2.0, we introduced the idea of Environment Profiles as a way to extend your customization reach into the deployment process. Initially, these profiles gave you the ability to directly assign IP addresses to virtual machines in your deployment, declaratively specify virtual machine naming formats, and easily split a single pattern deployment across multiple cloud groups. In IBM Workload Deployer, you will be able to use these same profiles to set resource consumption limits for pattern deployments. In particular, you will be able to set cumulative limits for virtual CPU, memory, storage, and software licenses used by deployments tied to a specific profile, thereby giving you finer-grained control over cloud resource consumption. The picture below shows the new resource limit aspects of environment profiles.

Virtual system patterns are key in the deployment model choices for IBM Workload Deployer. Not only did we carry the concept over from WebSphere CloudBurst to IBM Workload Deployer, but we made it even better. Expect this trend to continue!

Application-centric cloud computing is the main thrust behind the new capabilities of IBM Workload Deployer v3.0. But what does that really mean? After all, application-centricity is really just a concept. Granted, it is an important concept, but it is fairly meaningless until it is put into action or implemented. IBM Workload Deployer does just that with its new Virtual Application Patterns (VAPs).

VAPs are the embodiment of the workload pattern approach I briefly discussed in an overview post a few weeks back. The idea with a VAP is to give the user an interface through which they can provide their application, specify dependencies, declare functional and non-functional requirements and then deploy. Of course application middleware is a part of the overall solution, but IBM Workload Deployer has the smarts to build, configure, and integrate the necessary infrastructure in order to support the user's application. This is completely hidden from the user, so they are liberated to focus on the application and its requirements.

If we scratch a bit further beneath the surface of a VAP, we see that these patterns contain three primary pieces. These primary pieces are components, links, and policies, and they are fundamental to understanding how virtual application patterns work. Let's start with the building blocks of VAPs, components. Put simply, components represent different resources and functionality profiles that make up your application environment. As an example, the IBM Workload Deployer Pattern for Web Applications is a VAP that contains components for an EAR file, WAR file, message queue, and any number of other components that are typical requirements for a web application. The components will certainly vary based on the workload type (i.e. the components included in a web application VAP would be different than those included in a batch application VAP), but they are the foundation of any VAP.

From the ground up, the next logical element we come to in the VAP is a link. A link is a way to declare a dependency or integration point between two components. As an example, consider a VAP with a WAR file component and a database component. You might draw a link between the WAR component and the database component to indicate that your web application uses or otherwise depends on the database. IBM Workload Deployer interprets this link, and takes it as a directive to configure the integration between the two components as a part of deployment. In this case, that may mean configuring a data source in the application's container. This is just a simple example, and an application may have any number of links between components.

Finally, we come to the policy element within the VAP. A policy is a way for a user to specify functional and non-functional requirements for their application environment. Users attach policies to the VAP, or to components in their VAP, and IBM Workload Deployer interprets and enforces those policies. In the context of a web application, one example of a policy could be a scaling policy. The scaling policy might indicate scaling requirements for the application that included minimum application instances, maximum application instances, and conditions that triggered scaling activities. IBM Workload Deployer would use the information in a scaling policy within a VAP to appropriately manage the deployed, running environment. Other examples of a scaling policy may include a JVM policy that provides configuration directives for the java virtual machines in your application environment or a logging policy that defines logging configuration options. In any case, the policy element allows VAP builders to influence the configuration and management of the application environment.

In the example VAP below you can see the use of components (Enterprise Application, Database, User Registry, Messaging Service), links (blue lines between components), and policies (Scaling Policy, JVM Policy):

In total, when I look at a VAP a particular word sticks out to me: declarative. VAPs really enable declarative, application-centric cloud computing. What do I mean? By declarative, I mean you are telling IBM Workload Deployer what you want, but not necessarily how you want it done. It is the job of IBM Workload Deployer to take care of the how. This shift in approach to application environments enables the potential for significant savings, and more importantly to me, lays the foundation for a more agile, flexible approach to deploying and managing application environments.

There will be more in the weeks and months to come on IBM Workload Deployer, so stay tuned. I also want to put a plug in for a new blog from Jason McGee. For those that do not know Jason, he is an IBM Distinguished Engineer, and the lead architect behind IBM Workload Deployer. Be sure to check out his blog for insights on this new offering, as well as for all things cloud.

Jason McGee will be leading the second GWC Lab Chat this week on Wednesday, 4/20. The very timely topic is related to recent announcements from IBM regarding the IBM Workload Deployer (see previous posts). Entitled "Application-Centric Cloud Computing" the discussion will focus on the concept of deploying and managing your application workloads in a shared, self-managed environment rather than manually creating and managing the application middleware topologies. It places the focus on the application rather than the infrastructure. This concept promises to deliver greater simplicity, elasticity, and
density among other things. It can position your business to react more
quickly and efficiently to the increasing demands of your customers and
free you from the managing all of the details.

Many of you may have already heard Jason speak last week at IMPACT 2011 in the cloud mini main tent or perhaps at any number of other sessions that Jason was involved in. Jason is the key architect behind IBM's WebSphere cloud activities. Obviously, Jason understands the cloud space very well and has a clear view of the evolution into Application-Centric Cloud Computing. This GWC Lab Chat will provide the opportunity to get your questions answered and share your perspective on this technology.

Jason will provide a brief introduction to the concepts and ideas and then lead an open discussion. Put it on your calendar and plan to attend - and please plan to bring your questions and comments to help foster a rich discussion. We want to hear from you.

If you haven't registered yet it is not too late - learn more and register here. It is easy to register and there is no cost. This is a very timely event and a great way to dig a little more deeply into concepts you first heard at IMPACT or perhaps hear them for the first time. Don't miss it!

IBM Impact 2011 was a wildly busy week! Customer meetings, entertaining keynotes, informative sessions, and hands-on labs packed the 6 days with more than enough action. I spent a lot of the week presenting sessions and conducting labs for the newly announced IBM Workload Deployer. As one would expect with any new announcement, we got tons of questions about IBM Workload Deployer. While I cannot capture all the questions and their answers here, I will try to cover some of the more prevalent ones below.

Question: What happened to WebSphere CloudBurst?

Answer: The short answer is, it simply went through a rename. WebSphere CloudBurst became IBM Workload Deployer v3.0. The version 3.0 acknowledges this is an evolution of what we started with WebSphere CloudBurst, which was at version 2.0. Why remove WebSphere from the name? The fact that this is now an IBM branded offering is more accurate as it is capable of deploying and managing more than just WebSphere software.

Question: What is new in IBM Workload Deployer?

Answer: While there are many new features that I will be talking about over the coming months, the most prominent new facet is the introduction of workload patterns (also referred to as virtual application patterns). As opposed to topology patterns (traditionally referred to as simply patterns in the WebSphere CloudBurst product), workload patterns raise the level of abstraction to the application level. Instead of focusing on application infrastructure and its configuration as you do with topology patterns, workload patterns allow you to focus on the application and its requirements. When using workload patterns, you provide the application, attach policies that specify functional and non-functional requirements, and deploy. IBM Workload Deployer handles deploying and integration the middleware infrastructure necessary to support the application, and it automatically deploys your application on top of that middleware. In addition, IBM Workload Deployer manages the application runtime in accordance with the policies that you specify in order to provide capabilities such as runtime elasticity.

Question: If I am a current WebSphere CloudBurst user, what does this mean for me?

Answer: Not to worry. You will be able to use all of your WebSphere CloudBurst assets (patterns, scripts, images) in the new IBM Workload Deployer. All of the capabilities previously in WebSphere CloudBurst are present in IBM Workload Deployer (terminology may vary slightly -- topology pattern instead of just pattern for instance). Additionally, we continue to expand on the functionality that you are familiar with from WebSphere CloudBurst. This includes updates for Environment Profiles, new IBM Hypervisor Edition images, new pattern building capabilities, and more. Stay tuned for more information about these new features and for information on how you can move your WebSphere CloudBurst resources to the new IBM Workload Deployer.

Question: How do I choose between using workload and topology patterns?

Answer: There are a number of factors that will lead you to using either workload patterns, topology patterns, or both. The primary decision point will be how much control you really need (not want). When using workload patterns, you sacrifice some customization control over the configuration, integration, and administration of the middleware application environment since the workload pattern and management model abstracts away the 'guts' of the system. Everything about the workload pattern is application-centric. On the other hand, topology patterns give you intimate control over the configuration, integration, and administration of the middleware application environment. As a general rule of thumb, if your application requirements match the capabilities of a workload pattern, that is the way to go as it can greatly reduce complexity and cost associated with deployment and management. If a workload pattern does not meet the needs of your application, topology patterns can still greatly reduce cost and complexity and you can tailor them to fit almost any need. Beyond generalities, there is no hard and fast rule for choosing one over the other. It comes down to understanding your application environment and its needs.

Question: Is IBM Workload Deployer an appliance like WebSphere CloudBurst?

Answer: Yes, it is still an appliance, but an updated one! The new appliance is 2U, and it provides more storage, processing power, and memory. It is still just as easy to setup, but just slightly bigger.

Well, that is all for now, but I will be back many times over the coming months with more information. In the meantime, if you have any questions, please leave them in a comment below.